Zaurus And Head Mounted Displays?

[rrnwexec]

One barrier to being fully mobile is having to stare at a screen. Difficult to do in some applications.

Has anyone interfaced a Head Mounted Display (HMD) with a Zaurus? Seems that there are many many HMD's out there. See http://www.stereo3d.com/hmd.htm

With a good HMD and a different input method, the Z could easily morph into a killer wearable platform. Has anyone achieved any success with this?

Cheers,
Randall.

[Da_Blitz]

i had a look into it, the problem is there is no cheap solution (ie that dosent cost as much or more than the new lines of zaurus), unless you want just the command line in which case there is a manufaturer that sells a HUD that plugs into a serial port or uses bluetotth serial port profile (micro optical)

your best choices are micro optical, trivisio or Icuiti (all taken from that page, its the best refrence on the internet for that type of stuff)

if you want to read about others who have done it look up steve mann, who uses a pci/104 board with an x86 processor. it has all the info of what you need. The zaurus has some limitations that make it hard to do anything graphical  at greater than 640 * 480 @ 15fps 16 bit color depth but most HMD cant display more than this anyway

Interfacing: VGA, ntsc/pal (most common) serial port, take you pick, you can get a usb to vga adaptor now that works even if plugged into usb1.1 (some would refuse to work) and the 2.6 kernel has support for it in 2.6.13, there are CF adaptors and it wouldnt be hard to prototype your own vga adaptor to CF card.

imagine gps and a bit of video (on a usb 2.0 port) editing on the fly with this stuff, follow the yellow brick road.

[craigtyson]

The Achos has video out........

[matrix200]

I have some other idea.
Would it somehow be possible to get hooked up to the bus connecting the Z's lcd screen with the computer?
I know that would mean tearing the device apart but still could this be an option?
What kind of connection Zaurus uses to connect the computer to the lcd screen?

Another idea would be having vnc server (maybe someone will develop rdesktop server client since it is more efficient?) and having some hmd that has wifi card built in to connect. Or even better an ethernet connection which I assume would be faster then wifi.

[Da_Blitz]

i  belive linksys might have a vnc like server for confrences, its probelly running linux as well so you could hack somthing up

as for the LCD rewireing, its a good idea and mght be doable with some sort of buffer chip, i will have to look into it but i belive that most lcd screens dont have the green red blue lines with hsync and vsync, they have a simmlar arangment but the color lines work by truning each pixel on and off for diffrent periods of time but who knows, some of the pxa270 boards i have seen for embeded systems just chucked a buffer between the pxa and the vga port and said it had video out

yourve got my attention now, looks like my list of things to do is add more ram, more flash and video out

[Da_Blitz]

ok looking at the pdf's from intels website they do support lcd screens with a built in frame buffer ( i belive this is how the 2700g card appears to the x50v's pxa frame buffer.) what this means is if we can find a high speed DAC that can be hacked to interface to the LCD then we can do it, what i need thogh is high res photos of the internals of the cK series or more specifically i need to know what signals are on the ribbion cable and how to accsess the ones we need that arent on the cable

the only problem i can see is running out of sram to store the current frame, and higher resalutions will require you to turn off the pda's lcd screen, but if i had a choice between a monitor and the lcd i know which one i would take  when its not at a higher res you should be able to turn the cd on at the same time and get a mirror image

it all depends on what mode the screen is set up as (ie is the lcd screen thats already connected have an internal frame buffer?)

there is a good chance this will work  time to start researching

[Da_Blitz]

i have good news, the lcd out on the pxa provides up to 16bits and a vsync + a hsync, so all you need is a DAC that can operate at the right speed, i will have to do some more calculations but everything seems alright. you should be able to do 1024 * 768 @ 75fps

now for the really good news. you may be able to connect the 2700G to the zaurus. i am having a look at it now (i noticed it may be posible when looking at upgrading the memory) but it gets mapped as sram and uses the vlio and sram to communicate, fortunatly for us the sdram bus, flash bus, sram bus and CF bus all share some of the same pins. because of this we may be able to use some of the pins from other areas to get a working interface together

however keep in mind that that chip has over 300 pins so anything we come up with might not be worth the effort. lukily for us most of those pins are for the sub sytems of the chip tself and not for communicating to the host. ethier way its a custom PCB job (lukily i know a company who does BGA parts) and may be external.

if we are lucky it will just plug into the CF, or if you are an C1000 owner it should be able to fit where the microdrove sits.

no promises just thoght i would keep you in the loop

[adf]

If you could build it to connect to the cf slot, I think you'd have something pretty marketable.  Something like that would certainly make me reconsider going to a 270 based z (assuming the 2700g won't work with a pxa 255? --f it did, that would be even better)

[Da_Blitz]

looking at the docs there would be one or two wires you would have to run off the sdram chip but the rest should be able to come from the CF slot, i thoght of this when i was lloking at pin for pin replacments of the RAM and flash chips to upgrade the memory

i found compatible ones for the RAMbut i am not so sure about the flash, will have to look into it more but if my hunch is correct i think i might get a couple of 16Gb flash chips as "product samples" to test it out

ethier wa the 2700 would not be a simple plug in card, it would use the same io, (the CF card gives easy accsess) and you would be able to use that slot for a CF card as well but you still would need to solder a wire or two, the people with a c1000 have it luky in this regard as you hang it off the internal socket

as for the pxa250, if it supports Variable latency Input/Output (VLIO) and sram (it does support sram) then you could do it for that as well

[speculatrix]

just a thought.. does QT support a panning or scrolling window into the framebuffer... i.e. could we run the zaurus LCD at 640x480 but the display actually be 800x600 for mirroring on external device?

[speculatrix]

these guys have a USB-driven HUD, which means you should be able to just plug it into the usb host port on a 1000 or 3x00 (albeit might need supplementary power):
http://www.spi-inc.com/dataglass/specifications.htm

and it is really cheap at only $2,399.00!!!
damn, time to find another answer :-(

[Da_Blitz]

i dont really care if Qt has support for that or not (i belive it dosent however) as i am doing a roll your own type thing soon with 2.6 and most of this stuff would require a custom kernel anyway

as for the usb stuff, there is usb framebuffer support in 2.6.13 but the usb port is nowhere near fast enogh for this, you NEED the 2700G to do that (assuming we are talking about taking an image, modifing then displaying, overlays are diffrent)

btw the usb was for power only ;(

i have seen some serial console ones that were about 40 lines across for about $250 and on the plus side they were glassses mounted, that would just make people stare at you, however i am more into this (http://www.trivisio.com/tech_ARvisionHMD.html ) type of thing which would get me arrested

[speculatrix]

http://networks.silicon.com/telecoms/0,390...152104-2,00.htm

interesting stuff going on with HMDs for mobile users

[craigtyson]

Hm I feel a sad photo with a C750 a pair of safety gogles and some duct tape coming on...... ;-)

[polito]

Hm I feel a sad photo with a C750 a pair of safety gogles and some duct tape coming on...... ;-)

ROFL... after no sleep for quite some time, you have no idea just how funny the image conjured up by that statement was... hilarious.